Using scripting in aggregations

Scripting can be used in aggregations for extending its analytics capabilities to manipulate and transform the values used in metric aggregations or to define new rules to create buckets.

Getting ready

You will need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation, similar to the one that we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 1,Getting Started.

To execute the commands, any HTTP client can be used, such as cURL (https://curl.haxx.se/) or Postman (https://www.getpostman.com/). You can use Kibana Console, as it provides code completion and better character escaping for Elasticsearch.

To correctly execute the following commands, you will need an index that is populated with the ch07/populate_aggregation.txt commands – these are available in the online code.

In order to be able to use regular expressions in Painless scripting, you will need to activate them in elasticsearch.yml by adding script.painless...